LosTechies - Latest Comments

Re: Hacking Websites with Ruby and Nokogiri

Rooney — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:32:06 -0000

Where is this text file saved? I'm not able to locate it

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Mike — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:59:57 -0000

So what you are saying is that you are a crappy developer.

Someone who won't spend his own time to learn something new in his profession is worthless.

You are the reason people mock .NET developers.

Re: Hacking Websites with Ruby and Nokogiri

Momo Levi — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 10:02:42 -0000

Great !

mlevi2538@gmail.com

Re: Film Making: A Better Software Development Metaphor

Swapnil Bhavekar — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:21:09 -0000

thanks for this information ! it helps

Re: ADIAD

Tobias Tadysiak — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:13:20 -0000

If you are looking for a free alternative you may want to check Planthat: www.planth.at

Re: Hacking Websites with Ruby and Nokogiri

dalesmithtx — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:49:30 -0000

The open(urltext) method you use in Nokogiri::HTML() can also take a hash of header info. For instance, some sites block bots by checking the user agent header. You can use whatsmyuseragent.com to figure out the user agent you wanna use, and then pass open(urltext, "User-Agent" => some_user_agent) to Nokogiri::HTML(). Use this fearsome power only for good.

Re: Hacking Websites with Ruby and Nokogiri

Franklin Webber — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 11:17:03 -0000

Awesome. The happymapper gem is usually what I use for parsing XML but it does not currently support quite the flexibility of naked Nokogiri.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Steve — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:25:48 -0000

@Chad,

I'd never choose someone based solely on tooling. In fact, they could have been using the tooling incorrect for years which actually makes them much worse. I'd also likely hire someone with Fubu experience over someone who's never heard of it since they at least have gone outside the MS eco system (which more than likely translates into them being an above average developer).

But, when it comes to actually using the tool for projects, unless there was a significant advantage to using a niche framework, I'd still choose the one that has more documentation, a broader range of samples and a large community behind it. Which means ASP.NET MVC for .NET, Rails/Sinatra for Ruby, Django for Python, jQuery for a JavaScript Framework, etc.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Eric — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:18:39 -0000

Is Fubu MVC better? I guess I'll never know...

There is so much more documentation, guides, examples, videos, tutorials, simultaneous users, etc for ASP.NET MVC.

Maybe if I was a consultant with hours of bench time or the ability to bill a client for on the job training, I'd have the time to find out?

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

chadmyers — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 12:03:53 -0000

@Steve:

Sure, it's preferable if they already know the tooling. But choosing people or choosing tools based on popularity and ease of hiring is not a very good metric. It should be considered as part of the whole, granted, but it seems in the MS/.NET space, too often do companies pick sub-par technologies and people for the sake of convenience.

Developers are not construction workers that are just replaceable numbers (which is somewhat the impression I got from Peter and have witnessed in other companies and dev managers).

Dev frameworks and tools are not mere hammers that are intuitive and replaceable and have simple evaluation criteria and merits.

My point is that devs are not mere replaceable parts and tools are not mere replaceable parts. Both must be chosen carefully with many criteria taken into consideration during evaluation. Availability of pre-trained developers and popularity of a tool should be considered among the criteria, but, IMHO, should not overshadow the other criteria.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Steve — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 10:25:36 -0000

@Rod,

So you bought an SUV, and now you're complaining that it's not a sports car?

Why are you trying to turn .NET into something that it's not? There are plenty of other communities that are exactly what you want (Ruby leaps to mind), just go there rather than p!ss into the wind. You do realize you are tilting at windmills, right?

@Chad,

I don't think that's what Peter is saying at all. It's not like FubuMVC is lightyears better than ASP.NET MVC (if it's better at all, which is another subject, but the sake of this argument we'll say it's slightly better) making training a group of people worth the effort.

As a manager, say I need to pick a framework to build 5 new applications in which will require me to hire 20 new developers. In that case I'm going to choose ASP.NET MVC over FubuMVC every time. It's not that I'm looking for trained monkeys, I'm still looking for smart developers, but I'd much rather they have experience with the tools we would be using up front. Also, the number of resources for ASP.NET MVC on line are practically infinite compared to Fubu.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Ward Bell — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 02:06:53 -0000

Rod - I disagree strongly.

The NET community didn't blow anything.

The problem isn't that RedGate is a commercial firm nor that we might have to pay money for a great tool. $35 is a fair price. It's not about the price.

The Reflector fiasco has nothing to do with OSS v. Commercial s/w.

It is not written in the heavens that OSS makes better s/w than commercial companies do ... especially when "better" is broadly understood to include factors that are important to users of the s/w other than putative (and possibly temporary) technical advantage.

Nor did we "abdicate" anything. Reflector wasn't OSS, It wasn't ours. There were no worthy alternatives. We weren't suckered into a commercial product ... Reflector was IT and we were lucky to have it for free for so long.

Had it been a commercial product from the start we'd have been happy to pay for it ... AS WE PAY FOR RESHARPER.

I don't hear you saying that we've been lulled into complacency by JetBrains.

We were PISSED OFF about the Reflector thing for one reason only .. because REDGATE BROKE ITS PROMISE.

This offended our sense of integrity.

Once we've recovered, we'll cough up the $35 and be glad to have the tool.

p.s.: Killing L2SQL was the right call and EF is the right call too.

You want to talk about complacency. nHibernate documentation and support sucked ass until it started to get threatened by ... guess who.

There wouldn't BE a FubuMVC if there wasn't an MVC.NET. They're both pushing each other to be better.

StructureMap is better now in part because it fights with MS Unity.

RIA Services is pushing my company to be build a better product.

This shit flows both ways.

All the MS bashing is so juvenile.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Justin Angel — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 22:45:10 -0000

Hi Rod, you know I have the great respect for you, which makes it diffecult for me to argue a point against yours. But here goes.

1. Repeating your primary claim here is that "the .NET community abdicates control of its own destiny to commercial vendors".

Realistically speaking Rob, this isn't a completely OSS community and will never be such. The .Net community has always walked a tight rope between Microsoft blazing the way forward like a inebriated elephant and the bipolar behaviours and contributions of it's equally inebriated communtiy members.

The .net community has chosen to trust a well-known 3rd party with a shared community asset. That trust was obviously misplaced. Two things happend as a result: 1) Said 3rd party's reputation has imploded. 2) a plethora of 3 existing options I know off has come forth in the last 2 weeks to replace Reflector.

Blow it? Dude, this community fucking rocks. A mono based reflector (MonoReflector), a sharpDeveloper based reflector (ILSpy) and our lords and saviors at Jetbrains putting Reflector into Visual Studio via R#. Fucking Awesome.

So yeah, a half decade old product just got busted open like a Piñata, but look at all the candy!

2. Your core argument however is that the .Net community replaces it's existing accepted OSS assets with Microsoft delivers assets. My argument against that is two fold: 1) the OSS assets weren't as appealing in comparison for the most part (2) There are new OSS assets in new areas introduced by the community at rate far exceeding that in which Microsoft can ever ship replacements.

2.1. The martyrs of the .Net community: Subversion is a massively inferior product in comparison to TFS, nHiberante is an unholy mass of undecipherable HBM files for a large set of us, MSTest is far from being the standard of .Net unit testing, Unity is also from being standard .Net IoC but it has definitely improved the whole set of IoC projects, CC.Net & NAnt are heartbreakingly bad in comparison to TFS & MSbuild,. Projects get replace Rod, there's no emotional attachment here. Like the man himself (Dalli Lama) says "What works stays, what doesn't - go". (Since he was referring to religion I assume this can be applied to .Net frameworks)

2.2. The plethora of new .Net open source projects. Have you seen Codeplex recently? It has 20,000+ open source projects mostly centered on .Net. You know how many .Net codeplex projects have had releases in 2011 (the last 45 days)? more than 1,000. A thousand open source projects Rod. How can you seriously claim this isn't a vibrant open source community?
There are dozens of MVVM solutions, dozens of ASP.Net MVC helpers, a dozen .Net based CMS, hundreds of scientific libraries, dozens of IoCs, and so on.

Summing up. The specific example of Reflector shows the awesomeness of the .Net community. Complaining about a couple of over-the-hill OSS projects who are half a decade old while 20,000+ other OSS projects were released and saying it's the death of .Net OSS is disingenuous.

-- Justin Angel

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

foldip — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 11:24:41 -0000

Actually I agree with your interpretation of my comment:
.Net is not the cutting-edge. MS is not cutting-edge. MS is a technology follower, always was and probably always will be. You still can do amazing and nice stuff with the .net tools, but in general the main benefit when one chose them is the more controlled development stack.
To give another example: IE is crap. Everybody knows that. BUT: If I were a company with 5k developers and 30k internal desktops (like the one I am working for), probably I would say: go for IE as the company standard. The top-notch devs can develop apps which probably will keep working with the 6-weekly released Chrome for the next 1-2 years, but you can't guarantee to get 5k of such devs, you can't guarantee that all the external javascript libs you are using will still work, or the off-the-shelf solutions will be also compatible without careful monitoring and testing and maintenance. That's simply the safe choice in this case, even if from the technical point of view it's mediocre.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

DaRage — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 11:13:55 -0000

Well put peter.

In short: Dot Net is not cool stop trying making it one.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

chadmyers — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 10:37:39 -0000

@peter

I see your point, but I'm not sure I agree with your logic. By your logic, I might as well just train monkeys to use the tools rather than finding smart, bright people who can use anything or even make their own tooling if necessary.

IMHO, the problem in the .NET space is expressed by your post: we settle for mediocre because it's just easier to find people who can pull levers and push buttons on our tool-of-choice rather than thinking to solve the problem the right way (which may not involve the tool-of-choice).

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

peter — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 09:14:01 -0000

You missed the point of why companies chose .net stack in the first place - it's because of MS. It's because those tools are all integrated, provided and supported by one company, because there are trainings, training companies, training materials and standard exams.
You know what happens in the Java world when a company tries to hire somebody for jee development? One of the main questions are: "Which application server you have experience with?" It's cool that there are a lot of them, and many os frameworks and so on and so on, but eventually it's all bad for a company which want to hire 10-20-200 developers for the job. It takes months in a project to learn the basics and nuances of every of them and that knowledge is hardly transferable to another one.
It's much more secure for the company to rely on ms products than to find out which os projects are reliable, have the community support, work well with the other 20 components of the future system - which all have to be evaluated one-by-one by the same aspects...
FubuMVC... ok, let's choose it. Let's hire 10 experienced developers for it. Oh stop, or recruitment companies say that there are no 10 experienced devs with that knowledge on the market. And also who can interview them and measure their knowledge? Ok, then let's just hire 10 good devs who wants to learn FubuMVC. Suddenly we are getting millions of CV-s, because there is no good filter anymore on them, so the hire process takes longer. Also we are loosing 2-4 weeks net development time in the six months project because they don't have the experience? Thats multiplied by 10 = 5-9 man-months dev time lost and the same amount of money spent on "training"... and so on and so on.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Josh Schwartzberg — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:46:09 -0000

I just want to clarify that CSLA is not an alternative for NHibernate or Entity Framework, it's a business object framework that has an extensibility point for accessing data.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Hrvoje — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:37:55 -0000

Well, i can understand this blog post, but don't agree at all.

MS shouldn't build sofrware that allready exists as third party OSS?
They also have all rights to build bad software! As long I have alternative, I don't give a damn.

And, what is .net community? Few percent of ALT.NETers? Vast majority of .net developers don't have any issues with half-baked MS frameworks, as long they can get stuff done, at least basic stuff.

Does regular vulgaris/avarage .net dev need FubuMVC? No! Does he need NH? No! Does he need OpenRasta? No!
Do I need alternative for MVC, ORM, REST, SOAP, RIA, ...? Yes! And I feel that I have decent chioces and I'm happy with new stuff and people that drives that whole damn ecosystem. It's not the sexiest, but at least i dont have to do PHP :)

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Roger — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:14:00 -0000

Oh, quit whining. Just because there are commercial alternatives to open source projects does not mean the open source projects are dead.

What we need is competition. Competition drives innovation.

Open source is good. I use open source solutions in my work, but I also use commercial solutions. Use what works best in your particular situation.

Also, if I remember correctly Reflector was never open source. Oh, the humanity!

"Hosted by Community Server Commercial Edition" -- What? How dare you not use open source blog software!

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Danielle — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:34:20 -0000

Good post Rod...agree with most points. I I stumbled upon this website soon after Reflector news dropped and all the buzz on twitter;

http://www.keepdecompilingfree...

To me it sounds like someone else is already working on a replacement solution. Hopefully the .net dev community smartens up in the future.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

enriquein — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:18:55 -0000

I love it when people who seem to have never been exposed to the horror that is enterprise development make blanket statements like "no one uses MSTest". What really sucks about this situation is that the one that makes the decision to use Entity Framework over NHibernate is usually some enterprise middle manager that is blinded to only use Microsoft blessed software or some upper level exec that isn't very tech-literate. I mean, I still remember my boss' answer to "why the hell are we using SSIS to solve these issues?" The answer: "because Microsoft says it's a great tool." Of course, ignoring all the headaches and late nights they had staid recently with some issues.

THAT mentality is what kills alternative/OSS projects.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

Claudio Lassala — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:46:52 -0000

For folks who are saying "nobody uses MS-TEST", I have to disagree... unfortunately. Some companies/clients demand MS-TEST to be used "because it's the MS solution, integrated with VS... blah blah blah"... :(

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

firestrand — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:22:22 -0000

I agree except for the Linq to SQL reference. A MS employee did a good job of explaining and creating a great example of how to create a Linq provider at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mattwa... Granted it isn't really being maintained, but it is an open source Linq to SQL option.

Re: Dear .NET Community, You Blew It!

ulu — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:02:15 -0000

Being an active user of NHibernate and StructureMap, I choose them not because they are OSS, but simply because they are better. If I were to fork NHibernate, for example, in order to move it to a different direction, I'd have to forget about everything else and spend a month or two just to figure out how it works. Would I abandon everything in order to build an OSS version of Reflector or Resharper or every closed source tool out there? No thanks.

I believe it's OK that the source is closed to modification as long as it's open for extension. Asp.Net MVC is quite open, but if its core principles are not for you, you don't fork it, you build another framework. Same with EF, or Nancy, or StructureMap. Back to Reflector, why would you need a half baked, not extensible OSS version, when you could pay for a mature original and extend it as you need?